medium termhttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term
HT BlogThu, 20 Jun 2013 08:39:27 +0000http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2enhourly1Advantage Nitish but poll game isn’t over yethttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=614
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=614#commentsThu, 20 Jun 2013 08:39:27 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=614Why did Nitish Kumar walk out of the NDA? Three explanations have been offered. The first is Nitish’s own version. He says that he cannot be part of an alliance whose effective prime ministerial candidate is Narendra Modi, who Nitish regards as anti-Muslim and divisive. As it is, he suggests, he comes from a secular tradition and was only able to accept an alliance with the BJP because of the moderate nature of A.B. Vajpayee’s views. Now, he says, he is willing to work with L.K. Advani who has left his past as the rath yatri behind him. But the hardcore Hindutva wing of the party is unacceptable.

Then there is the view of political analysts. They say that Nitish is concerned about the state’s Muslim minority. At present, Bihar is fragmented into different vote blocs. There are several parties fighting for control of these blocs: Laloo’s RJD, the BJP, the Congress and Paswan’s LJP. In this situation, there will be many close contests. And a swing of one or two per cent can decide the outcome of any election. In these circumstances, Nitish does not want to alienate a large chunk of his electorate.

And then, there is the explanation offered by the BJP. Modi supporters say that Nitish had agreed to the appointment of Modi as head of the campaign committee and was prepared to say that this was the BJP’s internal affair. He only changed his mind when Advani protested Modi’s elevation. Given that the controversy was raging, Nitish thought this was an ideal time to walk out on a matter of principle. Plus, he has kept the door slightly ajar, suggesting he might return to the NDA if Advani become Prime Minister.

For all this, there is no doubt that Nitish has done himself considerable harm. In a fractured polity, arithmetic often counts for more than performance or ideology. One reason why the NDA did well at the last Lok Sabha poll in Bihar was because the combination of Nitish’s vote bank and the BJP’s support base gave it a decisive edge in many constituencies. On the other hand, Laloo, whose grasp of arithmetic is poor, did not realize how much he needed the Congress’ vote share, broke his alliance and paid the price.

This time around, Nitish faces two disadvantages. The first is, of course, arithmetic. Any party that leaves an alliance to fight on its own risks losing seats. The second is that, in a Lok Sabha election, voters are swayed by national issues and look to pan-Indian parties and coalitions rather than regional outfits. To be fair, this does not always happen but if there is a strong anti-Congress feeling and a pro-Modi wave, then Nitish’s party is bound to suffer.

Nitish is not a fool. He must know all this. So, why then did he break the alliance?

A poll conducted by C-Voter for Headlines Today this week tells us that Nitish will lose seats and that the BJP will gain. But here’s what is interesting. At present, the NDA has 32 seats from Bihar. But if the BJP goes it alone, arithmetic ensures that no matter how much it gains in vote share, it will only win 16 seats. That means that without Nitish, the NDA will halve its Bihar total. This cannot be good news for a coalition that hopes to install Narendra Modi as Prime Minister.

The argument in favour of Modi has rested on an interpretation of a paradox. Yes, say Modi supporters, a Modi candidacy will scare away such allies as Nitish Kumar. But this will not matter because Modi’s leadership will so increase the BJP’s tally that the NDA will easily win around 230 seats. Once that happens, they argue, it will not be difficult to get the Jayalalithas and Mayawatis to fall in line. Yes, the likes of Mayawati and Mamata Banerjee and perhaps Jagan Mohan Reddy may be reluctant to join a Modi-led coalition but they will certainly support it from outside, claiming that the country needs an alternative to the Congress.

The C-Voter poll suggests that there are problems with the interpretation of the paradox. Perhaps Modi’s leadership will bump up the BJP’s numbers. But it will not elevate them sufficiently for the displeasure of the allies to be overcome. In fact, these numbers suggest that a BJP/NDA that only touches 200 will not be able to get 80 more seats under Modi’s leadership. That’s when somebody like L.K. Advani will offer to step in as a consensus candidate.

My guess is that Nitish Kumar has made these calculations. The Lok Sabha polls don’t really matter to him. No matter what happens, he will continue as chief minister of Bihar. And the Assembly polls are still two years away. So, in a sense, he has nothing to lose.

The BJP, on the other hand, does have a lot to lose. Not only has Nitish’s withdrawal increased the perception of divisiveness surrounding Modi (and Advani has encouraged that view) but it may also seriously dent the NDA’s tally.

Of course, there is still a year to go. It is possible that Narendra Modi will tour Bihar, receive a rapturous response and ensure that the BJP sweeps the state.

But as of now, the JDU may not have won the game but it is certainly Advantage Nitish.

]]>http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?feed=rss2&p=61416Manmohan Singh’s fall from gracehttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=611
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=611#commentsSat, 11 May 2013 16:26:50 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=611Most people will tell you that this has been a week of mixed fortunes for the Congress. On the one hand, the party won an impressive victory in Karnataka, crushing the BJP. And on the other, it was forced to sack two central ministers. So, the pundits will say, there has been good news and bad news and the signals are far from clear.

I don’t necessarily disagree with this view. But I think it misses the point. The real message from the events of the last week is clear and apparent. When the Congress fights elections far away from Delhi, on issues that matter to ordinary people (such as governance in Karnataka), then it does well. But the moment we get to Delhi and to the central government, the party is in deep trouble.

I won’t dwell too much on the reasons for the Karnataka victory, having spent a full day saying my piece on television. But the Congress needs to recognise that despite its inherent strengths and the BJP’s inherent weaknesses (both of which explain the Karnataka results) there is no real hope of an improvement in its fortunes unless it does something about the government at the centre. Otherwise, no matter how much Congress workers achieve at the state level, the prime minister and the government will always let them down.

I don’t want to pre-judge Pawan Bansal’s guilt while the investigation is on. But in the case of Ashwani Kumar, the facts speak for themselves. Nobody – not even Kumar himself – disputes that the law minister asked the CBI director to show him an affidavit that was to be filed in court. Nobody disputes that two joint secretaries, one from the PMO and the other from the coal ministry, were also asked to check out the affidavit. And nobody disputes that as a consequence of this political interference, the affidavit was changed.

Ashwani Kumar’s defence was that the changes were minor and that he was within his rights to ask to see the affidavit. Both these claims have been dismissed by the Supreme Court. According to the bench, the law minister should not have been shown the affidavit by the CBI. And as for the changes, the Supreme Court does not believe they were minor. It says that they struck at the heart of the affidavit.

So, in the Ashwani Kumar case at least, we have a degree of certainty. There can be no doubt now that a minister of the central government interfered in the investigative process and knowingly and wilfully forced the CBI to submit an affidavit that did not serve the ends of justice.

Given all this, only two questions remain. The first is the question of motive: why did Ashwani Kumar change the affidavit? And the second is the question of consequences: even when it had been demonstrated that Kumar had perverted the course of justice, why was the prime minister so reluctant to take any action against him?

Only one explanation fits the facts and provides some answers. Ashwani Kumar is Manmohan Singh’s man. He is a nice enough fellow, bright and articulate with an ability to get along with people. But he is a political lightweight who is not taken seriously by the Congress party. He owed his ministerial berth entirely to Manmohan Singh. When he was dropped in a reshuffle, it was Manmohan Singh who insisted that he must be brought back and gave him another portfolio over the objections of the Congress party.

It is no secret that any investigation of Coalgate is bound to involve the prime minister. After all, he was in charge of the coal portfolio when many of the events under investigation occurred. Clearly Kumar’s interest in the affidavit was to ensure that the CBI submitted nothing to the Supreme Court that embarrassed Manmohan Singh. That is why a joint secretary from the PMO was drafted to assist the law minister.

When Kumar’s intervention became public, many people expected that he would be sacked. And certainly, given Manmohan Singh’s reputation for integrity and propriety, that was a reasonable expectation.

So, why didn’t the prime minister act? Well, because he could hardly punish Ashwani Kumar for trying to save him, could he?

Eventually, after the Congress president made an issue out of Kumar’s continuance in office, and the Supreme Court was critical of his role, Manmohan Singh had no choice but to sack Kumar. Even then, he spent all of Friday trying to save his protégé – which is why Kumar’s resignation was only announced late at night.

When you contrast the stunning victory in Karnataka with the sordid machinations of Coalgate, you realise what the problem is. The Manmohan Singh government is now so deeply involved in scams and cover-ups that it has lost the ability to tell wrong from right. The prime minister has lost his moral compass as he has struggled to stay afloat.

No matter how well the Congress does in the states – and Karnataka follows a victory in Himachal – it will never recover its national stature or the sheen it had when the UPA was first elected as long as this government ducks and weaves between scams and cover-ups of those scams. And Manmohan Singh, who we hailed in 1991 as a second father of a resurgent nation, is now – sadly and tragically – beginning to look more and more like Richard Nixon in the last.

]]>http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?feed=rss2&p=61180The unjust logic of people who defend terrorismhttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=607
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=607#commentsFri, 26 Apr 2013 20:26:49 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=607A few years ago, I heard Imran Khan speak at the HT Leadership Summit. He was part of a panel that was discussing Kashmir and when it was time for questions, the cricketer-turned-politician turned his attention to the subject of terrorism.

In response to queries from the audience about Pakistan-backed terrorism in the Kashmir Valley, Khan fell back on the oldest of clichés. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” he said solemnly.

Later, he went on to make the point that if a man was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice (i.e. give up his life) then this proved that the poor wretch had been made so miserable by the forces of oppression that he was willing to part with the one thing he had left.

At the time Imran spoke, Pakistan had not yet turned fully into the terror-ridden, failed society that it is today.

So, the great man was able to squat on the moral high ground and lecture us Indians about how the violence in Kashmir was merely a response to our oppression and our unwillingness to give the freedom fighters the independence they deserved.

I thought back to Imran and his justification (or explanation, at any rate) of terrorism when I saw the saga of the Boston bombings unfold on our TV screens.

Judging by what we know, the two Chechen brothers who were involved in that incident suffered no oppression. They lived largely contented lives in the United States and friends described the younger brother as successful and well adjusted.

It is true that the Chechens have a grouse against Russia–as they have demonstrated by resorting to innumerable acts of terror within Russia — but the United States is hardly their oppressor.

In fact, the Russian government has complained that the US has often seemed to be on the side of the Chechens. Nor could it be that the terror suspects felt alienated or oppressed because of religion.

Americans have a slightly racist view of Islam: they associate it with brown or black people. The Chechen brothers were white and their religion never seems to have become an issue.

Certainly, there is no evidence that they were discriminated against because they were Muslims. And yet, if investigators are to be believed, these men tried to kill innocent women and children at the Boston marathon.

What led them to commit this act of terror? If they were indeed, in Imran Khan’s words, freedom fighters, then whose freedom were they fighting for?

And given that they led secure, middle-class lives in America, they were hardly the deprived wretches he described who had nothing to offer except for their lives.

At another HT Summit, a few years after Imran had offered his valuable insights into terrorism, Tony Blair spoke about the London Tube bombings.

Blair expressed the sentiment that many of us also shared. He could just about understand, he said, why a Palestinian thrown out of his home might take to violence. But what of the London bombers?

These were children of immigrant families who had enjoyed all the benefits offered to them by the British state, had suffered no oppression whatsoever, and still felt the urge to go and kill hapless civilians. It made no sense.

As should be obvious, Blair was right even if he was mystified by the causes of terrorism. And though Imran was certain in his characterization of terror, he was clearly wrong.

The truth is that there is no easy explanation for terrorism. Yes, it might sometimes be the last resort of a desperate man. But more often than not, it is an unnatural impulse that is motivated more by abnormal psychology than by any ideology.

At some level, we can just about understand why a desperate man would attack his oppressor. (As Bhagat Singh attacked British colonial officials.)

But that is not terrorism. The true definition of terrorism is when non-combatants and people with no connection to any oppression are attacked.

A man who shot Hitler would not be a terrorist. But a man who blows up a train carrying hundreds of innocent civilians is clearly a terrorist.

So, what makes the terrorist do it? I suspect that the answers continue to lie in the realm of the brain. At some level, a terrorist is like a psychopath, a serial killer who justifies his lust for blood by quoting ideology or imagined oppression.

Often, in our part of the world, terrorists share the mentality of hit men. Compare the guys accused of shooting Deepak Bharadwaj with Ajmal Kasab. In both cases, the murderers had no enmity with their victims.

They suffered no oppression and had alternative ways of making a living. They chose murder only because they had no qualms about taking lives and thought that they could earn easy money.

According to the account provided by Kasab’s father, his son left home after fighting with the family because they would not give him money for fancy new clothes.

He fell in with a terror group not because of any religious commitment or because of any empathy with oppressed Muslims elsewhere in the world.

He enjoyed the glamour and the excitement of belonging to this group and had no hesitation in causing suffering to others.

The trouble with the Imran Khan-type of defense of terrorists is that it tries to turn them into heroes and sympathetic figures while totally misunderstanding their motives or their psychology.

It is a trap that all of Pakistan fell into before their country became the sort of place where a car bomb a day does not seem like an unusual occurrence.

The way to treat terrorists is the way we treat serial killers, mass murderers and other psychopaths.

To resent suffering is normal. To protest against the oppressor is also normal. But to kill innocent civilians is far from normal. It is the mark of a sick mind, of the spirit that drove the Boston Strangler, Jack the Ripper and Raman Raghav.

And yet, the world is full of people who share Imran’s views and repeat his justifications. Even Imran himself has not said anything about shutting down the camps that train terrorists who kill innocent people in Kashmir and other parts of India.

And I suspect he makes a distinction between violence in Pakistan which he regards as terrorism and violence in Kashmir which he probably still sees as a fight for freedom.

Any civilized society must reject the specious justifications and the empty rhetoric offered by the likes of Imran Khan. We must never compromise with terror.

And when it comes to awarding punishment to terrorists, we should punish them for their acts and pay no attention to the ideological humbug they offer as justification.

]]>http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?feed=rss2&p=607469This means war: BJP, Congress get nasty on Twitterhttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=604
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=604#commentsFri, 12 Apr 2013 08:25:13 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=604What does the Twitter battle between Congress and BJP supporters over Narendra Modi’s speech to the FICCI ladies organisation tell us? Quite a lot, actually. Here are some of the major conclusions.

1) The Congress is now taking social media seriously. It has always struck me as being bizarre that a party with so many young leaders with foreign degrees, fancy smartphones, and expensive computers should have been so much behind the times. When individual Congress leaders have tried to reach out on Twitter–Shashi Tharoor, for example–they have been slapped down by their colleagues within the party.

2) It has long been suspected that the preponderance of so-called Internet Hindus on social media is not an entirely spontaneous phenomenon. Thanks to journalistic stories and TV discussions, we now know that the Sangh coordinates strategy with several hundred ‘volunteers’ and tells them what the targets for the day are. This has been admitted to, on television, by the head of the BJP’s Internet wing.

We also know, thanks to investigative articles in such magazines as India Today, that the BJP runs control rooms staffed by hundreds of boffins who are directed to create Twitter storms.

When the boffins succeed, BJP leaders go on television to announce that as the Sanghi targets are trending on Twitter, the people of India have spoken.

3) There is no point in getting self-righteous about the BJP’s Twitter manipulations. It is clear that the Congress has decided to do exactly the same thing. If you believe that the Twitter effort that led Feku to trend worldwide when Modi was speaking was spontaneous then you probably believe anything: that the moon is made of blue cheese or that Modi fasts for Ramzan each year.

4) The Congress is doing exactly the same thing as the BJP. The Sanghis say that the Congress is now spending many crores on a Twitter campaign. Perhaps this is true. And perhaps the BJP ‘volunteers’ are all selfless chaddiwallahs who survive on love, fresh air and the odd goose-step. Either way, it doesn’t matter very much. The point is that Twitter storms are being manipulated.

5) Most American politicians hire agencies to manage social media for them. It is inevitable that the practice will spread throughout the world. So, I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

What does concern me, however, is the quality of the tweeting. The BJP’s Twitter army targets individuals whose views do not accord with the Sangh’s objectives. They are subjected to vile abuse by assorted ‘volunteers’ whose abuse is then retweeted by their colleagues. It is easy to identify them because most of them are semi-literate and the English is nearly always awkward or faulty.

On the other hand, I am not sure that the Congress is going to occupy the high moral ground either. The recurring theme of the Feku campaign was an attack on Modi’s personal life. I have no idea if the claims about Modi’s wife are accurate but there is something worrying about a campaign that stoops so low.

6) Does any of this matter? In voting terms, probably not. But it matters in television terms. One reason why Twitter has so much influence is because it sets the news TV agenda. Anchors and editors keep referring to Twitter to find out what’s happening, foolishly believing that Twitter trends are accurate reflections of the national mood.

7) I think the Twitter war is going to get uglier in the year ahead. But here’s the point to ponder. Why has a Twitter phenomenon that should be a battle between the Congress and the BJP turned into a war over a single individual: Narendra Modi. Even the BJP tweeters have no interest in defending any of the party’s other leaders. Their single focus is Narendra Modi.

Does this tell us something about the control rooms and who controls them?

]]>http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?feed=rss2&p=6040Arvind Kejriwal, left behind by the middle classhttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=601
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=601#commentsFri, 05 Apr 2013 10:41:59 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=601I don’t know if you have noticed but today, Friday 5 April, is the 14th day of Arvind Kejriwal’s indefinite fast. Kejriwal has lost 8.5 kilos and as a diabetic, his condition must give cause for concern. Today’s HT quotes a diabetes specialist as saying that the acid level in his body is rising. The specialist adds, “Acidified blood is entering everywhere and this will have a negative influence on all organs, including the brain. It is not at all advisable to continue the fast.”

It is not as though Kejriwal’s fast has passed entirely unnoticed. The fast is part of a civil disobedience movement against power and water bills. According to a statement issued by Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, 9.6 lakh people in Delhi have signed a petition vowing not to pay inflated power or water bills.

And yet, at one level, the fast has indeed passed unnoticed. Only a year ago, if Kejriwal had declared that he was going on an indefinite fast, television channels would have interrupted regular programming to offer continuous coverage of the fast. The Kejriwal story would have been the main headline on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, not tucked away on some inside page, as it is these days.

So, why do the media care much less about Kejriwal and his activities now than they did a few months ago?

You could argue that this is to do with the issues he is protesting about. Perhaps the demand for a Lok Pal Bill had a greater resonance than his current complaints about inflated power charges. But I am not so sure. If the Lok Pal debate was so powerful and popular an issue then why is it hardly covered by the media these days? And surely, the issue of inflated bills hits every consumer of media where it hurts the most: the pocket. So, I don’t think that Kejriwal has fallen from public favour only because of the issues.

It could be, as Kejriwal himself seems to believe, that the media began to take a less charitable view of his activities when he started to attack industrialists and media proprietors over secret assets. Kejriwal’s supporters say that the media are unwilling to back a man who attacks advertisers and media owners.

It could also be that the movement Kejriwal and Prashant Bhushan launched three years ago lost its sheen once their figurehead, Anna Hazare, parted ways with them. Perhaps the internal dissensions within Team Anna, as the media liked to call the movement, contributed to the general lack of interest in Kejriwal and his activities.

One other possibility is the simplest one of all: fatigue. Every story has a certain life cycle. And when that cycle ends, the story runs out of energy and the media move on. Once upon a time, when Kejriwal and his colleagues went to meet ministers to consider revisions in clauses of the Lok Pal Bill, such meetings were accorded the status of global summits between the world’s most powerful men. But now, public interest, fickle as always, has moved on and nobody cares.

There is yet another theory, which I personally do not accept, but which sections of the Congress subscribe to. This theory holds that while Kejriwal, Hazare, and the others may well have been sincere about their protests, the crowds at their gatherings consisted of Sangh Parivar supporters. The Parivar did not just provide the crowds, the so-called volunteers and the financing but it also used its contacts in mainstream media and its control rooms in social media to promote the movement.

But now, say Congressmen, the Parivar has achieved its objective. It has used Kejriwal and his men to damage the government. With the UPA on the defensive, confused and wounded, the Parivar can now go ahead with its real agenda: the promotion of Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders who seem like strong alternatives to the damaged Congress. According to this theory, Kejriwal has outlived his usefulness to the Parivar. So, there are no crowds. There is no media blitz. And the Parivar teams on social media have lost interest in him.

But there is yet another explanation and it seems to me to make the most sense. For over a decade, the Indian middle-class saw unparalleled prosperity. As incomes grew, so did the numbers of the middle class: millions more were added to this class year after year. But there was a social compact between the politicians and the middle class. It was taken for granted that the middle class would count for nothing in terms of electoral politics. The middle class did not mind this exclusion because times were good and incomes were rising.

When the global economy hit a road-block and India slipped into recession, that social compact broke down. The middle class was no longer guaranteed a constantly improving standard of living. If the politicians could not deliver prosperity, then, said the middle class, why should it tolerate its exclusion from the political system? This turnaround led to the explosion of middle-class anger we saw on TV, on social media and most notably in the Hazare movement. The politician became the villain because he had failed to deliver middle-class prosperity (“bad governance”) and the middle class searched for non-political solutions.

That phase has now ended. The middle class has realized that nothing really changes in India unless you take electoral politics seriously. So the focus has shifted to elections, to political parties and to new alternatives from within the system, to the likes of Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi.

Kejriwal and his colleagues have tried to fit in with this shift by launching their own political party. But the middle class has not taken kindly to the transformation. As long as Kejriwal attacked politicians, they loved him. But once he became a politician himself, his utility ended. If the media are going to focus on change brought out by politicians, then why not go with the big boys, the Modis and the Rahuls? Why waste time on a newbie and a minnow like Kejriwal?

It is significant that Kejriwal’s current fast is not taking place in the centre of Delhi. Instead he has chosen to fast on the edge of east Delhi in a place called Sunder Nagri and most of the people who have come to see him are not middle class but belong to the city’s vast underclass. Perhaps Kejriwal has caught their imagination. And perhaps they are the ones who will vote for him.

Because the middle class certainly won’t bother; its denizens have moved on.

(Arvind Kejriwal has announced he will end his hunger strike on April 6)

]]>http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?feed=rss2&p=60151Sympathy for Sanjay Dutt, but he must pay the pricehttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=597
http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=597#commentsFri, 29 Mar 2013 08:48:11 +0000Vir Sanghvihttp://blogs.hindustantimes.com/medium-term/?p=597Now that Sanjay Dutt has said that he does not want a pardon, let’s end this debate once and for all. If Sanjay is willing to pay his debt to society, having exhausted all his legal options, then we should not stand in his way.

But first, a few clarifications. Much of the debate has centered on the deaths that occurred during the Bombay bombings. People have spoken in emotive terms about those killed in that tragedy and sought to link Sanjay’s conviction to their deaths. “How can we forget the martyrs of Bombay?” is a common refrain. And of course, the objection would be valid if Sanjay had any connection with the bombings. But according to the Supreme Court, he was not involved in the bomb blasts conspiracy at all. So yes, we must never forget those who lost so much during the bombings. But it is not fair to Sanjay to blame him for that tragedy.

According to the Supreme Court, Sanjay’s crime was this. He acquired assault rifles in an effort to protect his family which he perceived was under threat after the Bombay riots of 1992/3. The court says it understands his motives but the law is the law. His possession of these weapons is a crime under the Arms Act and the minimum sentence is five years. Therefore, said the court, it had no choice but to sentence him to five years in jail.

The language of the judgment suggests that the court was not unsympathetic to Sanjay. Not only did it not regard him as a terrorist, it also cleared him of any involvement in the actual blasts case. As for the judgment and the sentence, it simply had no choice given the overwhelming evidence that proves that Sanjay possessed the weapon.

Those who argue for a pardon for Sanjay usually frame their appeal in terms of his complete lack of involvement in the blasts conspiracy.

This is fair and true. But the Supreme Court already knew this when it passed its judgment. So let’s forget, for a moment, about the blasts. All that Sanjay has been found guilty of is possessing a weapon. And that is a crime no matter which way you look at it.

The other defence offered by Sanjay’s supporters is that he needed the weapon to protect himself. But once you use this argument, you go down a slippery slope. Sanjay was a big-time movie star. He lived in luxury in Pali Hill. He had the money to hire private security guards. Now, contrast his situation with the poor Muslims who lived in slums and tenements, who had their homes ransacked, their daughters raped and their relatives killed during the riots. If any one of these people had called up a gangster and asked for an assault rifle, would we have seriously disputed their convictions or sentences? We would have taken the line that it is a dangerous precedent for citizens to start turning to the underworld to procure assault rifles for use on the streets of Bombay.

And indeed, many of the convictions in terrorism cases are based on no more than the possession of deadly weapons. As a society that tries to live by the law, we simply cannot accept a situation in which citizens start arming themselves and turning to the underworld for protection. Once we do that, we might as well kiss the rule of law goodbye.

The only difference between Sanjay Dutt’s case and that of the many others who have been arrested for carrying dangerous weapons is not that Sanjay was under greater threat. It is that he is a movie star. If we are so unwilling to show any mercy to those poor slum-dwellers who armed themselves and consorted with gangsters because they felt under threat during communal riots then how on earth can we justify using a different yardstick for Sanjay Dutt?

That leaves the so-called humanitarian objection. I do not deny that Dutt has suffered. When he was arrested, I was one of his most vocal supporters. I believed that he was the victim of politics and that he had been targeted by opponents of his father, Sunil Dutt, who was then an MP. Nor did I have much respect for the Bombay Police’s investigation into the bomb blast case. (Here I have to declare an interest: I was a friend of Sunil Dutt’s and still feel very warmly towards his family at a personal level. Sanjay’s sister, Priya, for example, has my admiration for her work as an MP.)

But it is one thing to argue that a man who has been convicted of no crime and is hardly a terrorist should be treated humanely. And it is quite another to argue that a man who has been convicted of a crime by the highest court in the land should be let off because he is a movie star or because we feel warmly towards his family.

As for Sanjay’s sufferings, as he himself admits, he has fared much better than the other accused in the blasts case. All of them have had their lives destroyed. Even those who were acquitted of any involvement in the conspiracy have had their worlds shattered and can never resume a normal existence again. So, let’s not talk of suffering. If we were to use those grounds, then there are many people much more deserving of a pardon than Sanjay Dutt.

So, what should Sanjay do? Personally, I think he has done the right thing by saying that he does not want a pardon. He should go to jail for the three and a half years or so that remain of his sentence. My guess is that he will probably get out earlier for good behaviour, etc. By the time he is released, he will have won our hearts with his willingness to take his punishment like a man not like some weeping brat. He made a mistake by consorting with gangsters and acquiring arms. He did so with the best possible intentions. But he broke the law. And now he must pay the price.

When he is released, those of us who already feel warmly towards him – people like myself – will respect him more for having had the courage to accept incarceration. There is more bravery involved in admitting that you have made a mistake than there is in calling up your gangster pals and asking them to send over a couple of Kalashnikovs.

I doubt if his career will suffer. He has been through much worse before and emerged unscathed. This time around, when he walks out of jail, he will have not just our sympathy but also our respect. And respect trumps sympathy every time.